Tuesday, 20 November 2012

This is my current desktop background picture, taken with the "starry sky" function on my camera, which spends 30 seconds taking in the light, and then 30 seconds putting it together to form a picture. It was taken inside the tower of Nykirken, Bergen, in the room behind the clocks. The colours are not adjusted, it's really that blue. One of the most beautiful rooms I've ever seen.

PS. Wondering about what all that concrete is doing inside a 17th Century church? The roof and tower were reconstructed in the fifties after having been bombed in the WWII.

Friday, 16 November 2012

For reasons unknown, I've been listening quite a lot to this amazing song lately. However, as it has the the most boring music video in the history of the planet Earth (with no architeture whatsoever, except for a white void which I'm sure Le Corbusier would have loved), I'm throwing in a couple of pictures with designs for a Martian city, made by the brilliant visual artist Thomas Denmark:

Friday, 2 November 2012

In the early 1970s, the Norwegian artist Hariton Pushwagner created a dystopian vision of the modern city, with cars, monotony and soulless architecture, called Soft City. In this amazing series of drawings, he showed a day in this horrible society where identity is history, variation is fault and likeness the prime virtue. In many ways, this was probably nor only a reflection of Pushwagner's political views, but just as much a reaction to how Norwegian architecture was developing at the time.

One example can be found in Fantoft student hostel in Bergen, where repetition, uniformity, lack og scale and boring and ugle materials are combined with boring setting to create something that could easily have inspired Pushwagner.

The artist kept returning to Soft City, and not all of these drawing come from the original series. A book with the first edition of Soft city was published some years ago. I own a copy, but I'm not sure if it can be bought online. The ISBN number is 9788291187785, and the book is very much recommended.

Thursday, 1 November 2012

My former classmate Thomas is the definition of sympathetic, and a rather clever tree-bender. At the beginning of our secound year, we joined forces in attacking a couple of goat willows with our braiding abilities and our sharp scissors, creating, as you can see, something looks like a rather nice tree, out of what used to be just a mess.

Last week, we followed up by not only re-pruning the first trees, but also making sense of several other bushy things of the kind which keep popping up around our school. I completely forgot to do a before-shot, but above, the reader may see what it looked like afterwards. Another shot below, with the sunset, Thomas, yours truly and the tree, in that order.

To find out more about creative bending, braiding an dpruning of living trees, check out Ivan Hicks' book Tricks with trees, of which I own a much-loved copy.